Les Cayes. Ladies send Toussaint verses; an address of fifty-two signatures reviles Rigaud.

Rigaud conducted this war as a poor captain; from the capture of Petit-Goâve onward he committed the gravest errors; he remained at Les Cayes when the Black populations themselves of the West and of part of the North were holding out their arms to him; he inflamed the passions of the men of color at every point in the colony, and everywhere he abandoned them to the vengeance of Toussaint Louverture. His fall brought down with it a multitude of families whom his errors had compromised; selfish, choleric, jealous of every influence, he was, from the beginning of the revolution, the secret enemy of Beauvais, whose ever unsullied glory tormented him. On the soil of exile he refused their daily bread to his companions in misfortune, who were crushed by want.

Yet hatred of Toussaint had grown so strong in the South that Rigaud left behind him there deep regret and a blind admiration. The horrible acts of vengeance that the general-in-chief carried out, in contempt of the amnesty of 1 Messidor, made men lament all the more the fall of a chief whose errors and mad passions had turned the colony upside down from top to bottom.

Toussaint had just overthrown the greatest obstacle to his project of independence; from now on he will march with a giant’s stride toward the goal he had set himself.

Dessalines, continuing his march, entered Les Cayes in triumph. His army, although it had suffered every kind of privation, gave itself up to no excess. He dashed off in pursuit of Rigaud. Only at the foot of the morne of Tiburon did he learn that Rigaud had embarked. He returned to Les Cayes, where he awaited the general-in-chief. The colonists, learning of Toussaint Louverture’s approach, urged a great number of ladies to present him with an address. On 2 August 1800 (14 Thermidor) the ladies sent a deputation to meet him, charged with offering him the testimony of their gratitude. Their sentiments were expressed in the following verses:

“Magnanimous hero, whom France appointedTo be the restoring God of these lands,You awaken in us the flattering hopeOf seeing peace and happiness live again here.May the astonishing union of your virtuesAssure you a place in immortality;We cherish that pleasing presageIn repeating that nothing was ever better deserved.May your days, prolonged to the age of second childhood,Never cease to flow free of every misfortune,And, convinced above all of our gratitude,Receive with this the offering of our hearts.”

This address was followed by another piece, begotten by terror; fifty-two signatures of Black, mixed-race and white men covered it. It was filled with the basest flattery of Toussaint Louverture and the coarsest insults against Rigaud, who was called in it infamous, a brigand, a perjurer, an assassin. Each man sought to save his head, threatened by Toussaint Louverture’s vengeance; but all this adulation will not save the vanquished population from the most horrible proscription.